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Butte’s anguish over housing imbalance

CRESTED BUTTE – Jim Schmidt has lived in Crested Butte since 1978, and during that time he has seen the housing crunch come and go. It’s booming again, but this time the crunch feels different, says Schmidt, a member of the Town Council.

That’s also the impression of Mark Reaman, long-time editor of the Crested Butte News. “It isn’t just affecting the blue-collar ski bum/service worker types,” he writes. “Professionals and their families are feeling the crunch. It is darn difficult for anyone to get a place.”

Reaman’s newspaper tells of a community meeting about affordable housing that drew more than 100 people. The Town Council, in the words of Reaman, “threw gallons of mud against the affordable housing wall” at the meeting. The list is long. Ideas include: “Glamping” (glamorous camping) at select spots in the town; providing access to temporary showers and bathrooms; developing shipping containers into housing on the edge of town; and converting obsolete town buses into dorms.

Another idea is to set up a 1 percent local nonprofit, similar to the 1 percent for the Tetons of Jackson Hole, with local businesses volunteering to chip in 1 percent of profits to a fund dedicated to local housing.

Also floating around is the idea that the town needs to stop priming the tourism pump until it has the infrastructure, including workforce, to accommodate the business that already exists.

“Some of that mud will stick while some will rightfully slide to the ground,” Reaman added. But he points out that it’s not as if Crested Butte and other local jurisdictions have done nothing. Close to 25 percent of the permanent population now lives in deed-restricted affordable housing.

More affordable housing is in the oven. A 30-unit rental complex called Anthracite Place will be ready next year and $500,000 of infrastructure will be installed this summer in two full blocks to allow later construction of housing.

What’s going on to create so much anguish?

Schmidt points to reduced long-term rentals. “We had a stock of housing from the old mining days that provided a lot of long-term housing. These were very basic houses and they have been fixed up and remodeled over the years,” he explains.

Now, he says, many houses are being rented over the Internet to short-term visitors. “The VRBO phenomenon seems to be coming in like a tsunami. Just a couple of years ago, sales taxes collected from private houses and condos were about 35 percent of the total sales tax in the accommodations category and now they are 65 percent with the hotels also going up,” Schmidt reporters.

“Our biggest ‘hotel’ is all the houses in town,” he adds.

Demand has also increased for workers, especially in summer. Crested Butte’s summer economy in recent years has surpassed that of winter.

“We have always had a big Texas and Oklahoma influx of visitors and second-home owners, and despite the recent backing off of oil prices, those economies have been doing quite well,” explains Schmidt. “Throw in the global warming factor heating up those states the last several summers (also stretching our summer weeks on both ends), Colorado and Crested Butte is a great alternative to frying in the sun. This summer promises to be even busier.”

This provides jobs but not housing. “The wage-to-real estate price equation is ‘waaay’ out of whack right now,” Reaman says.

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Helping Idaho be Wyoming’s bedroom

JACKSON, Wyo. – As residents of Jackson and Teton County talk about a possible sales tax increase to pay for affordable housing, Steve Duerr has a different idea. Writing in the Jackson Hole News&Guide, Duerr, a real estate agent, proposes to revisit an old idea to bore a tunnel under Teton Pass.

The tunnel would dismantle the barrier between Wyoming’s Teton County, where private land is scarce and real estate prices sky-high, and Idaho’s Teton County, where there’s more private land, prices are less and, for that matter, there’s just a lot less nightlife.

A good many workers in Jackson Hole already commute over Teton Pass, although it’s steep and sometimes scary during winter. The drive from Victor and Driggs, the Idaho towns, to Jackson takes about 30 minutes in good weather.

Taos hopes hotel will restore heyday

TAOS, N.M. – A 65-room hotel under construction is at the center of efforts to draw visitors to the Taos Ski Valley. The ski area hit a high of 364,000 skier days in the mid-1990s but in the first decade of this century slipped to an average 224,000 skier days a year.

Gordon Briner, chief executive of Taos Ski Valley, says the hotel now under construction at the base of the ski area is the most important piece in regaining market share. The hotel is expected to be open by the end of 2016.

Briner tells the Taos News that the ski area has lost 100 lodging units or more since its heyday in the 1990s. “And even when we had all those beds, we felt we were short,” he said.

Under the new ownership of Louis Bacon, a billionaire hedge fund manager, the strategy is to build a hotel instead of condos, even though a hotel is more expensive to build, more expensive to operate, and accrues revenues more slowly.

But, in the long run, a hotel provides a greater value for the ski area, Briner told the newspaper. He expects a 5 to 10 percent increase in skier days each winter.

The hotel, the Taos News explains, is the first step in the ski area operator’s movement toward vertical integration. The ski resort wants to own everything from the rental shops to the lifts to the lodging. Last year, Bacon’s corporation bought the Bavarian Lodge and Restaurant on the mountain’s backside.

Briner says the first target of new marketing will be to attempt to entice former visitors to return to Taos. Beyond that, Taos seeks to appeal to people with a sense of adventure. “If you’ve got a go-for-it, adventuresome spirit, even if you’ve never skied before, come to Taos,” he explained.

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New hotels moving forward in Aspen

ASPEN – Development of new hotels has been moving forward in Aspen.

The Aspen Times reports that the City Council has now approved the second of two hotels, called Base1 and Base2. Together, they will offer 81 rooms. The developer, Mark Hunt, plans to open the two hotels by the end of next year. Rooms are to be smaller than 200 square feet and rent for $200 per night.

By Aspen standards, that’s affordable – something town leaders have said it is important to maintain. That affordability was one reason that the Town Council gave the developer a substantial allowance on density, 15,000 square feet, or more than twice the normal limit for a lot that size.

But will the hotels stay relatively affordable? A former mayor, Mick Ireland, appeared as a citizen to ask for more than good-faith assurances. He didn’t get his way.

A few blocks away, owners of the Boomerang Lodge plan to move forward on construction of a 47-unit condominium-hotel along with several other free-market residential units and two employee housing units. The approvals for the work were given in 2006, The Times explains, but the work was stalled by the Great Recession.

The existing lodge, which is closed and blighted, according to The Times, was built by an Austrian immigrant, with the first units open in 1956. This was early in Aspen’s post-World War II renaissance as a ski resort. Charles Paterson, the immigrant, had studied at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Studio in Wisconsin.

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Vail still chewing on cannabis use terms

VAIL – Aspen, Telluride and Crested Butte allowed sales of recreational marijuana as soon as it was legal, in January 2014. Vail, however, is taking its time.

The Town Council last week discussed their options at length last week, but postponed any decision. Town residents, by a wide margin, voted with a majority of voters in 2012 for legalization. But a town survey that includes residents, visitors and vacation-home owners overwhelmingly showed opposition.

Councilman Greg Moffet was most clear in voicing support for ways to accommodate a desire to consume cannabis, “to provide the best possible guest experience.”

“I am most concerned about creating an environment where a percentage of our guests – and we need to make peace with this fact – want to consume this product,” he said. “ I think it is incumbent on us to not put our heads in the sand as to what is going on here. The status quo is broken.”

Mayor Andy Daly stressed the need to understand the issue of marijuana use from the perspective not only of national visitors, but international visitors.

David Chapin, a council member and a long-time restaurateur, noted reduced odor of cannabis in the last few years at his restaurant. But he also reported that guests sometimes have to be reminded that while consumption of cannabis in Colorado is now legal for those 21 and older, it is nowhere legal to consume in public.

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Swill and swat: Whistler tops in both categories

WHISTLER, B.C. – Does this sound like any mountain town you know? In a survey of communities in British Columbia, Whistler ranks first in binge drinking, defined as having five or more drinks at a time for men and, for women, at least four.

But Whistler also ranks as the most active community in the province. More than two-thirds engage in at least 150 minutes of physical activity a week.

“You’ve got a young, transient population in Whistler that is exercising more than the Vancouver coastal average, and after exercising, they’re obviously having a few more beers than they should be,” said Dr. Paul Martiquet, from Vancouver Coastal Health.

Whistler also ranked first in the sense of community, at 82.3 percent, compared to 53.8 percent in Vancouver.

 

– Allen Best

For more, go to www.mountaintownnews.net